


I Will Not Let This Burn, Too

by warmommy



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, For the love of god do not look up necrotising fasciitis, Hurt/Comfort, The Breaking Point, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 14:08:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19395730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warmommy/pseuds/warmommy
Summary: “Yes,” he snapped before you could say anything. “So what? I love you, big deal, you don’t have to be a dick about it. Goddamn.”Or, the aftermath in the Bois-Jacques.





	I Will Not Let This Burn, Too

First Sergeant Lipton was going from foxhole to foxhole, much like a chicken with its head cut off, but with purpose. There was a quiet suggestion of laughter you could hear from each one he visited. He was doing his best, you knew. That was all any of you could manage.

For your own part, you were supposed to be at the aid station, but Dike wasn’t around to care, and Winters turned a blind eye. It gave Gene or one of the other medics reprieve to catch a hot meal back in town as well as providing much-needed support. You also suspected that he empathised with the strong urge to return to the company, after being separated. When you could, you brought in what meagre supplies you managed scrounge together.

So, after long hours and sleepless nights at the aid station, surrounded by the stench of festering wounds, gangrene, necrotising fasciitis, and death, you would put on your coat and sneak out on the first Jeep headed back to the line.

There was another bonus that was far more valuable, in terms of morale. Because you were a woman, the only one around, each man saw in you a figure of much-needed comfort. Every one of them wanted to be babied, in his own way, and none of your stupid babies believed you about the snow and sunburns. None of them were fed enough to account for metabolisms exacerbated by extreme cold. There were not enough bandages for even half of the men present, and nobody had anything more than his jump boots, standard issue, and a pair of socks over his hands to keep warm. There wasn’t a single fathomable reason to deny a single one of them some bit of creature comfort.

Some were better at asking for it than others, some needed more than others. Those least ashamed of their high needs were Alex Penkala and Skip Muck. They took up ten minutes all to themselves, keeping you webbed in between them, their voices chirps and trills of excitement as they gossiped and gabbed. When had they become birds, in your mind? A kiss on the forehead apiece finally appeased them and you promised to come say goodbye before you left the line again. 

The one with the highest need for contact was the one who said nothing at all. You found Malarkey sitting up against a tree and the situation was more alarming than the last time you had seen him. He was slow to blink those darkened, sunken eyes, unfocused and watery. He didn’t even look up until you cleared your throat. 

“Oh, hi,” he said, drawing on a bare impression of a smile. “How’s it going, Lieutenant?”

“I’m fine, Malark. Here, let me see your hands.” You reached for them, wiggled your fingers to prompt him.

“My hands?” He rested them just barely on top of yours. 

“Yes, some of the men are complaining of stiffness in their joints from the cold,” you said, rubbing his knuckles gently. The examination quickly turned into just talking to him for a while, holding his hands, pretending as if an exam were still taking place for his own sake. Where he used to come barrelling into your arms, Malarkey never asked for comfort anymore, verbally or nonverbally. That man was missing. You refused to think the word “gone”, only “missing”, because one day you would see him again. You would. Don Malarkey was not lost to the world or himself, he just needed…

Hell, he needed what everyone did, just to get far away from Belgium. Back overseas. A hot meal, a warm bed, five more pairs of socks, a glass or two of whiskey…

Maybe then, it would all be all right. 

Gene looked displeased, but Gene normally looked displeased. When you were done carefully walking up and down the line, treating the physical and emotional ailments of men you were so glad to see still up and at ‘em, the two of you sat together, cross-legged in the snow, with a disappointing, sobering amount of supplies in between you. 

“You know, he’s been waiting for you all morning,” Gene said at last, giving that famed squinty-pout from underneath his helmet. He pointed just beyond you, at a lone figure facing away, seated on a blackened log. 

“I don’t think he has,” you said quietly. “I don’t think he likes the attention all that much, and you told me he’s whole and healthy.”

Gene frowned, so you stood. “Okay, okay. I’ll go.”

It wasn’t that you didn’t want to see Joseph Liebgott, it was that you wanted to see him too much. He had a distinct air that he gave off, not of unfriendliness, but certainly that he didn’t _need_ anyone. Given your distance from the enlisted as an officer and your distance from the company between split interests and investments, he sometimes gave you odd looks when you were near. He made your heart rate increase, and you felt that you only seemed to make him…well, annoyed. As such, you’d long ago made a promise to yourself that you would give him a wide berth and admire from afar, giving him only the attention he was required or sought himself, and taking none that you wanted as your own.

You weren’t sure which category this fell under, but you were crunching through the slushy snow, on your way to lay eyes on his face again, and it felt…exhilarating. 

“Liebgott,” you called out. He didn’t turn around, and that didn’t feel good. Perhaps you should just turn around…but the desire to see him and maybe hear some of his jokes and laughter was too great. You coated yourself in a thick veneer of professionalism when you spoke to him, almost as if he were the officer and not the other way around. “Can I assist you?”

You could see, even underneath all that helmet, how his eyes narrowed, how his lips curled and pursed. “You can fucking promise me you’re coming back.”

You very nearly lost your balance, hearing that. “I, uh, Liebgott, I’m not sure what you mean. This is my company, too.”

“They got you moving back and forth between the front line and the hospital like they intend to keep you there, and they _aren’t_ gonna.” Joe spat on the ground. His cheeks and lips were badly chapped from the cold and wind, and you looked for a pot of Carmex in your pocket. “Don’t ignore me.”

“I don’t ask to go there, and believe me, it’s not any fun. With all the screaming, necrotising fasciitis, puke, crying, pus, piss, blood, and death, standing out here, freezing my ass off is a much more attractive idea.” You knelt in front of him and gave him the tiny yellow pot. “Here, use some of this. That looks like it hurts very badly.”

“What’s it for?” He unscrewed it with difficulty through his ragged gloves. “This is girl stuff.”

“That is medical stuff,” you corrected. “It’ll protect your skin from the bitter-ass cold wind and make it feel better.”

“They send you with _this_ ,” he said, turning it over in his hand. 

“You’re being a real asshole,” you said finally, taking it from him. “I’ve been bringing everything I can, I’m doing everything I can and two jobs at the same time. No one has it easy, Liebgott. I’m sorry I’m not out here all the time or doing whatever it would take to satisfy you–”

“Will you pipe down? And stop with this 'Liebgott’, my name is Joe and you know it. I’m just pissed off they don’t make it easier for you. You’re doing all you can, so pipe down, fuck.” He pulled on your arm unceremoniously to drag you down beside him on that dead, frozen log. “What’s that thing you said? Neck something.”

“Necrotising fasciitis. Flesh-eating pathogens is the simplest way of putting it, although not entirely accurate. But yeah, flesh-eating.” You took the stick of gum he offered you with a smile. He was in a good mood, today, and it was a little hard not to take that and run with it. 

“That sounds fucking horrible, is that shit gonna happen to me?” he asked with alarm.

You shook your head. “No, a ton of other less-bad things are far more likely to happen to you than that, and it’s not hard to see it coming. Now you’re going to start running to me with every bump and bruise, asking if that’s it.”

Joe laughed and nodded. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. Flesh-eating?”

“Like I said, imprecise, but it gets the message across without having to go into all the blah blah blah.”

“I’m not gonna let them keep you at that hospital,” he said. “When we get outta here, we’re gonna need a friendlier medic than Doc Roe.”

You laughed. “No better T-4 ever existed, and he’s a terrific guy.”

“No, I know. Friendlier, that’s the key word. He’s a grim, serious fucker.”

“He does take everything very seriously, but he is supposed to. Taking care of everyone out here, full-time, can’t keep a handle on what’s left, who has what. I don’t have to tell you all this is a shitshow.”

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Y/N, I’m not shitting on Roe, I’m saying how bad I want you here,” Joe said. “Jesus. Fuck. I miss you. Goddamn.”

You hadn’t even known he cared that much for your presence, but you kept that to yourself. It wasn’t the most pleasant or flattering thing to hear someone say, and you didn’t want to ruin things. “I promise I’m coming back, Joe. I don’t spend any more time there than absolutely necessary.”

“You ever sleep?”

“No. Do you?”

He shook his head. “Little bit, here and there. Why don’t you try and rest your eyes while you’re sitting over here? Nobody knows where you are.”

“No, I’m fine. I’ve got to be going or I really will be reported AWOL.”

“Such fuckin’ bullshit,” Joe said. “Trying to give us hell for doing what we’re supposed to, being where we’re meant to be.”

You smiled at him, perhaps a little too wistfully, and stood. “Stay warm, Joe. Don’t fight.”

“Promise me you’re coming back.”

Your smile may have spread into a grin, but you’d already turned away, so he couldn’t see. “I promise, Joe. I promise.”

“You have to come on. German artillery hit the north side of the Bois-Jacques.”

At first, you did not register that this was not part of the dream you did not know you were having. When had you fallen asleep? You open your eyes and found yourself in the little dark room lined with cots where the nurses took whatever breaks they could.

“You have to come on,” the man said more slowly, as if you were incapable of understanding his words or hard of hearing. “German. Big shells. Death.”

“You need to curb your fucking attitude,” you said as you got to your feet. “Quite obviously people are dying, now take me to the line.”

“No, they called for _you_ ,” he said. “We need all the hands we have around here. You’re just going to have to make do. Supplies are on the Jeep. Move it.”

Fear climbed within you, reaching higher and higher, feeling as though it were clawing at the back of your throat and in your eyes. The chilly air that blew past made your ears and cheeks burn, made your eyes water, but what hurt most of all was your chest. No one had been able to tell you anything before you got onto the Jeep, and the driver took off without slowing down.

You saw great clouds of black smoke billowing ahead, and none of the trees that had been there the day before were whole any longer.

“Good God,” you whispered to yourself.

Upon climbing down from the Jeep, you heard steady, quick footsteps making their way towards you with concentrated haste. You looked, and it was First Sergeant Lipton, and that was the first hint that things were far more fucked than you’d even imagined.

He always looked serious, worried, sombre, even when he was idle, but the little slant to his eyebrows, the way he was biting his lip…

“Lieutenant? Ma'am? I’m hoping I could speak with you first, just for a moment.”

You nodded and let him take you a few yards away from the Jeep, away from everything else, all the noise, all the men’s voices, and he silently directed you to face the opposite direction.

Your throat was already trembling, and you pressed your eyelids tightly shut to try and keep them from watering. “Was it…” You cut yourself off to take a deep breath, steeling yourself. “Was it my Babe?”

“No, ma'am, Babe’s okay. He got stuck under a tree in his foxhole and was afraid, but he turned out just fine. That’s not it, ma'am.” Lipton looked down at his crossed arms and you could see then how hard it was for him to hold back, too. He cleared his throat. “Muck and Penkala, ma'am.”

Suddenly, all the air was knocked from your lungs, and you had made a sound you’d only ever heard from scared, dying men. Lipton put his hand on your shoulder as you struggled for breath, and this was why he was the one everyone trusted. He knew to pull you away, and he knew to warn you.

No, that just couldn’t be. They had been with you not even one full day before, holding you in between them. You could still smell Penk’s hair, you could still hear them laughing, you could still feel that cold metal spoon Skip had hung at the end of your nose with a layer of condensation. You’d confiscated it a while, refused to give it back to the little bastard until you were leaving.

“A shell dropped right into their foxhole, ma'am. They didn’t suffer…did they?”

“No.” You turned your spine into solid steel and bade the claws behind your eyes leave you be. You did what you had to do, what every officer did. “No, they didn’t suffer. They’ll never hurt again, they’ll never be cold again, they’ll never be hungry.” You took in a shaky breath and wiped your eyes one last time before looking at Lipton again. “Who needs my help, Sergeant? Who has the most immediate need?”

You worked until the sun rose and your knees had long been numb from kneeling in the snow, making assessments, giving directions to the T-4s. Guys kept running up to you, looking for hugs and answers, but you couldn’t give either one, not at the moment. You even turned away Babe Heffron, who meant to you almost as much as Alex and Skip.

“I’ll come find you,” you promised him, and yourself. The woman you were before was not going to wander away and go missing. Not now.

Several hours later, when everyone who’d needed evac was gone and those with more minor injuries were patched up as best as the lot of you could manage, you sat with Eugene Roe once more, taking inventory of what was left. Mostly you just stared at the spaces between you, at all the grubby instruments that needed to be sterilised and the collection of sulphur packets and syrettes leftover.

“I hate to ask you this, but I done lost mine again,” Gene said in a hoarse, quiet voice. “Have you got any extra scissors?”

“Yeah, matter of fact,” you said, feeling around your pockets where earlier you’d come across some metal and almost forgotten about it. When your fingers closed around the object, however, you knew immediately that you had no scissors for Roe.

“What? It’s your only pair?” He looked disheartened.

You slowly pulled it out, metal warmed slowly by contact with your hand, until you held before you one cheap little spoon.

“Getting confusing now, Y/N,” Gene said, all squinty frown again. “It ain’t suppertime.”

You held the spoon to your chest and slowly leaned over your lap. Your free hand went to your hair. “I forgot.”

“What’s wrong, what’s happening? What did you forget about?”

“I forgot to give it back,” you murmured heavily, fingers now tightening around the spoon. “This was Muck’s spoon, and I took it away from him because he stuck it on my nose. I was going to give it back to him, but I must’ve put it in my pocket and forgot about it. This was Muck’s. This belonged to Skip.”

It felt like several minutes passed, but it was probably only a few seconds. Still, you could feel yourself careening, and you just couldn’t _do_ this, not in front of Gene, not in front of the boys, _never_ in front of the boys…

“That’s your spoon,” Gene said suddenly. “He put it on your nose, that makes it your spoon. He wanted you to have it. He would’ve wanted it this way. Lord, have mercy, Skip. A _spoon_.”

You laughed, hard, and what a prince he was. He was a solitary figure, but he always just knew what people needed outside of mere physical and medical attention. It was a talent and a blessing you wished you possessed. He saved you from another strike of grief, having a breakdown in front of a subordinate, gave you forgiveness for taking Skip’s spoon away, and gave you permission to keep it, all in one go. Maybe it wasn’t right to laugh this much, sitting on the edge of death and destruction, but then again, that’s where you’d all been living for months. When you looked up, Gene was at least smiling, but soon after he stood, carrying with him the filthy instruments, and somebody else took his place.

It was the first moment of peace you’d felt in many, many hours. “Joe.”

“I didn’t want to bother you when you looked so busy,” he said, hands stuffed into his pockets, shoulders hunched to keep the collar of his coat up to his ears. “I’m so fucking sorry, Y/N.”

Like a madwoman with a spoon clutched to her chest, you pushed hair out of your eyes with your spare hand. “Don’t be sorry, Joe. I don’t even know what you’d be sorry _for_.”

“Being so fucking selfish,” he readily supplied. “Wishing you were here all the damn time, being mad that you weren’t. Not at you. I’ve never been so goddamn happy not to see you, when all that happened. To know you were someplace far away from me, and you couldn’t see or hear none of it.”

“I’d give anything to have been here,” you said in a gentle murmur.

“No.” Joe’s voice was sharp, firm. “Gonorrhea lost a leg, Toye lost a leg, Muck and Penkala dead, I don’t know how many injured, Buck just…gone. You shouldn’t have been here for any of that and I’m glad you weren’t because what would have happened if…”

“If what?” Your fingers traced over the smoothness of the spoon’s surface. “If I died, too?”

“Don’t even say it,” he snapped, but his voice had that same quality of loss and uncertainty as Lipton’s had before. “You’re not allowed to.”

“Say it or do it?”

“Both. Either.” Joe shook his head. “Come over here, Y/N.”

He still hadn’t said anything about your fixation on this spoon, and that was more impressive than anything else. Dirty, tired, hungry, covered in the stuff of human life, you trudged the few feet between yourself and the object of your constant affections.

It was so much more than a schoolgirl crush, and you wondered if you would ever be able to say that to him, if those words would ever be welcome, or their sentiment.

Joe took your hand and squeezed it hard, looked at you for a long moment. “I love you, you know.”

Your eyebrows shot up so fast it almost gave you a headache.

“Yes,” he snapped before you could say anything. “So what? I love you, big deal, you don’t have to be a dick about it. Goddamn.”

You laughed. “How am I being a dick? How’s it not a big deal?”

“I don’t like it when people refuse to take me serious 'cause I talk the way I do, or some shit. You know, I’m not Webster, I’m not Winters, I’m not–”

“You are Joseph David Liebgott, you fool.” You gave his hand a squeeze. “ _Joseph David Liebgott_.”

He smiled at you suddenly. “You know my whole name and you said it without shouting it or making it sound mean.”

“I said it the way I hear it with my heart when I look at you,” you said. Damn, that sounded stupid–but no, he was smiling again!

Right about then, the wind picked up, blowing with it fresh, fat flakes of wet snow. Joe put his arm around you and cleared his throat. Then he cleared his throat again. Then another time…

“What did I just say about being a dick?” he asked.

“I’m just enjoying this,” you whispered. “I’m not trying to be a dick.”

He tsked loudly. “Tell me how much you love me too, you smart-ass.”

Oh, fuck, embarrassing, so embarrassing. How did one forget something like that?

“I-I got caught up in the moment, and I…thought you didn’t even like me, and I was just thinking, right before you said it, how I didn’t know if I’d ever get to tell you that I love you, and I’ve avoided saying anything about how I felt for a long time because I didn’t want to make you hate me or avoid being around me,” you said, all in one somewhat-crazed go. You took a deep breath, looking at him and handling your spoon. “I even love you when you’re cranky. I love looking over and seeing you reading something. I can just tell how much you’re enjoying it and it makes me happy to see you so happy. I love everything about you.”

“All right, fuck it, I’m doing it,” Joe said, and before you could even think to ask what the hell he was talking about, his chapped lips were pressed against yours.

Carmex.

You smiled to yourself in that blown-out forest and put your arms around him, to warm him, to comfort him, and to draw him ever closer.


End file.
